With the advent of general access computer networks, such as the Internet, people may now easily exchange application data between computer systems. Unfortunately, some people have taken advantage of such easy data exchange by developing various threats, such as viruses.
In response to such security threats, anti-threat programs have been developed to identify and remove threats. In use, such anti-threat programs check a computer system for known threats. Typically, programs called threat scanners are installed to scan files, sometimes according to user preferences, as the files are created and/or accessed.
To this end, such threat scanners may include various functionality including, but not limited to locating data, or code, with certain “signatures,” or characteristics, associated with threats, and further making changes to the underlying binary data, so as to reverse any effects of the threat. Still yet, threat scanners may optionally make system changes to persistent data, like a registry, to reverse any changes caused by a threat. Thus, threat scanners are capable of highly-targeted computer code modification.
Unfortunately, to date, the foregoing capabilities of threat scanners have only been leveraged for dealing with threat-related issues.